There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who live in it and those who observe it. Those who observe it often have no choice but to somehow express what they see. That makes them, in some ways, cursed. They’re always on the outside looking in, with thoughts that run through their heads that they can’t contain. They paint. They write songs. They write books. Or, in the case of William Shakespeare, maybe the best writer who ever lived, they wrote plays.
Shakespeare’s name is never uttered once in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Hamnet, but it is mentioned once in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation. We don’t need to hear his name, but by the time we do, the magnitude of the story we’re watching unfold finally weighs heavily. Ah, this is what it’s all about. That guy, that writer.
The man who wrote this passage from Hamlet, it’s safe to say, was going through some shit:
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
And my all-time favorite Shakespeare quote from Macbeth:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare’s writing doesn’t just echo through time. It cuts a path and lights the way and always has. Maybe he had no idea back then his work would last this long, just as George Orwell most certainly didn’t. These writers had two gifts. The first was the eyes to see and the second was the courage to say.
That they were talented writers came second. That their words are so brilliant and resonate even now is the gravy. That they could see and they were willing to say is why their work has outlived and outlasted so many others. They paid a price for it; they had to have. Chloé Zhao’s exceptional film, yes, her masterpiece, Hamnet, is about the price Shakespeare paid in being someone with the eyes to see who had no choice but to write it down, to perform it, to have actors say it out loud.
Here is the pain I feel, his characters say, because he can’t. Here is the beauty I see, and he shows us with his words. Here is the life that is a “tale told by an idiot.” Here it all is, humanity’s contradictions, complications, the comedies and the tragedies. Here it all is for you, people who gather at the playhouse, to help you see what I see and give you some relief and maybe some joy in all of it.
Zhao has captured the internal worlds of Agnes (Jessie Buckley in the year’s best peformance) and the tormented/cursed Shakespeare who can’t live so well because life gets in the way of all of the cumulous clouds gathering in his mind and heart that he must, no matter what, get out on paper to make sense of it, to create it, to write it, to have people hear it.
Watching Hamnet made the rest of the world fade for a time —our ridiculous partisan warfare, the silly, pointless game we play in the Oscar race, the cancel culture scolds, the Roman colosseum of it all, and practical concerns like money and mortality. It faded, and I was caught up in it, the unpredictable, observant eye of Zhao and what she chose to tell and what she didn’t tell. She was taking us somewhere, I realized, and when we got there, I could barely breathe.
I would say that boosting expectations means people are bound to be disappointed, and maybe that’s true. Some viewers, and I’ve read reviews that reflect this, feel locked out. They see it, as some have said, as “misery porn” or “grief porn,” and maybe that helps them feel like they are in control of this mortal coil, this tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Maybe. I could not.
The point of Hamnet, for those who are willing to let it in, is to explain the necessity for art. That’s what that is. It is not more complicated than that. The eyes to see, the courage to say. It will only last through the centuries, however, if it tells the truth. Not the truth about events, or names, or places. The truth about life. Us.
This is not a complicated story, not in the wonderful book by Maggie O’Farrell and not in Zhao’s telling of it. It is an imagined question answered. O’Farrell wondered why Shakespeare never wrote a story about the plague, which killed so many in his time, and that made her wonder what might have happened to Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet. Did he die of the plague? If so, how did he absorb that death, that pain? And more importantly, what was it like for his wife, left alone in Stratford, to suffer through it?
Shakespeare’s “Lost Year” between 1585 and 1592 has never been explained, though some have theories about what might have happened to him. What is known is that he left school at 15, married Anne (Agnes) at 19, when she was 26, after she got pregnant with their eldest daughter, and gave birth six months after their marriage in 1583. They had twins in 1585, when the lost years began.
Shakespeare shows up in London as a well-known playwright by 1592, and Hamnet, his only son, dies in 1596. The novel Hamnet and now, the film, explore what might have happened to Shakespeare and how his wife was left alone to manage the harder part of life – not just caring for the children but burying one.
In real life, considering all of those swoony sonnets Shakespeare wrote, I’m guessing he probably was having lots of sex with lots of women in London, but no one will ever know for sure. That’s not the Shakespeare in this film. He is faithful to only his work, and there is only one woman for him.
“But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”
O’Farrell built an entire universe around the essential facts of Shakespeare’s life. She imagines Anne/Agnes as a child of a forest witch rejected and exiled by the town, an outsider. Agnes is a beautiful, bewitching woman who carries a kestral on her arm and feels herself at one with the natural world.
Because of that, she believes she is otherworldly, can see the future, and can heal the sick. She sees herself as almost god-like in this ability, thus no child of hers — no son of hers — could ever die. She has the power to save him. That’s the lesson she must learn in the book and in the film. She doesn’t have that power.
O’Farrell has taken great liberties with the life of Shakespeare, and this movie is like Shakespeare in Love; it imagines Shakespeare in life and attempts to fill in the gray areas. In both films, we see references to Shakespeare’s timeless classics — in Hamlet, Ophelia is told to “get thee to a nunnery,” which is usually interpreted as she was pregnant, like Anne/Agnes. Did Shakespeare resent it, resent her for trapping him in Stratford when he wanted bigger things for himself? That would be one interpretation.
No one can know what a man in the 1590s would have thought about anything. We have the work he left behind, words that are all around us and still quoted often, with character archetypes we can call up to help us understand human nature. He was bad at life, it seems. That’s not a requirement for being a great artist, but they often go hand in hand.
Shakespeare died under mysterious circumstances at just 51. He lives on in ways he could have never known back then. The eyes to see, the courage to say.
Movies that are so good they transcend the Oscar race are hard to write about. We pretend all of this nonsense actually matters—the ad buys, the predictions, the chatter, the buzz, the bloggers, the critics, the box office. It all matters in its own confined way, but ultimately, art will either echo through time or it won’t. If it tells the truth, it usually will. Telling the truth requires eyes that see, and it requires courage to be able to write or create art even in times of soft totalitarianism as we’re living through now. Artists are not free to write, even if they had eyes to see, and sad to say, most of them are too afraid even to allow themselves to see.
So that means being a William Shakespeare or a George Orwell is not for the faint of heart. It is a hard way to live, and you’ll die before you ever know how great you really were. What Maggie O’Farrell wrote and what Chloé Zhao has now directed is the truth, not of the events of the day, not of the real lives of Will and Agnes but of the spirit of creation, be it a woman who births children in a forest or a man whose thoughts haunt him and scream at him inside his head until he has no choice but to flee to London, to sit in a quiet room and to write them down.
Jessie Buckley is a revelation. She has become Agnes, forest creature. There is no line between who she is and the character she plays. She is a mystery to those who haven’t read the book (read the book) but on film she is a creature of the woods but a woman at a time when many of them died in childbirth, almost none were educated or could even read, and marriage was mostly their only possible path in life, though it was in the time of Queen Elizabeth.
The real surprise was Paul Mescal as Shakespeare. I did not expect such a powerful and effective performance from him, but he also gives one of the best performances I’ve seen this year and certainly of. His career. If I were Focus Features, I’d do a live read of Hamlet with these players, but have Paul Mescal play Hamlet. I need to see him in that role or any role in any Shakespeare play.
You’ve heard people say Hamnet “wrecked” them, that they couldn’t focus on anything else after seeing it. This will be true for many people, but not all, not those who feel locked out by the intense emotion on screen. But when you see the film for yourself you will see what I saw. Some of you. You will see how it was all the path to getting there, to where we understand the need for art. It is just a look between the two characters that says, “This is all I have because I couldn’t do anything else.”
And in that moment, at least for me, I was not able to breathe. The choking sobs were too much for me, and I was overcome. That is catharsis, but it is also the way out of misery, the way out of grief, the way out of madness. We need art like we need oxygen. This movie shows us why. Zhao can see and she has the courage to say and she does so with a minimalist’s discipline and an artist’s eye.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Truer words were never said. Art, however, signifies everything. Hamnet is a masterpiece, and if not the best film of the year, one of the best I’ve ever seen. And suddenly, at least to me, the Oscar race just got competitive.
